SEACOM has confirmed that services between Mumbai and Mombasa have been down since yesterday morning, after a repeater failed. The cable operator has confirmed that the fault will take ‘an extended period of time’ to fix, possibly as long as eight days. Most ADSL service providers which use SEACOM bandwidth have already started to re-route international traffic via SAT-3/SAFE. The failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe; traffic within Africa is not affected. ‘SEACOM has initiated emergency repair procedures to replace the repeater. Once mobilised, the repair ship is deployed to the location of the fault to pick up the cable. The cable is then brought on board to undergo the repair — the faulty element is replaced with a new repeater — before being put back in the water,’ an official statement read.
It is not the first time that the SEACOM cable system has experienced connectivity issues in recent months; it suffered a major outage in April. SEACOM is a Mauritian-based company, owned 76.56% by African investors. The remainder is owned by Herakles Telecom, an international development group based in New York City.